Dominant Impressions

Essays on the Canadian Short Story

Edited by Gerald Lynch and Angela Arnold Robbeson

Publication Year: 1999

Canadian critics and scholars, along with a growing number from around the world, have long recognized the achievements of Canadian short story writers. However, these critics have tended to view the Canadian short story as a historically recent phenomenon. This reappraisal corrects this mistaken view by exploring the literary and cultural antecedents of the Canadian short story.

Cover

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

CANADIAN CRITICS AND SCHOLARS, along with a growing
number from around the world, have long recognized the high
achievements of Canadian short story writers in this at-once oldest and
newest of the genres. However, these critics have tended to view the Canadian
short story as a recent phenomenon, as...

It Almost Always Starts This Way

I GUESS I BELIEVE THAT the only thing the writing of a
short story really requires is an altered state of mind.
Achieving an altered state of mind has never been much of a problem
for me; there are those with my best interests at heart who would argue
that it has occasionally been far too easy. I cannot remember a time when
this was not true, although I do remember...

Of Kings and Cabbages: Short Stories by Early Canadian Women

IN DREAMS OF SPEECH AND VIOLENCE, W. H. New argues
that "the short story is one of the most central of [Canada's] cultural adaptations
of literary form" (24) and it is a form in which women writers have
always been active. However, Janice Kulyk Keefer warns against an "essentialist
explanation" (170) for what has been...

"The Thing Is Found to Be Symbolic": Symboliste Elements in the Early Short Stories of Gilbert Parker, Charles G. D. Roberts and Duncan Campbell Scott

THE ESSAY ENTITLED "Modern Symbolism and Maurice
Maeterlinck" that serves as the introduction to the first series of his
translations of Maeterlinck's Plays (1894), Richard Hovey makes the bold
but not untenable assertion that in their symbolic practices Bliss Carman,
Gilbert Parker, and Charles G. D. Roberts are akin...

Present but Unaccounted For: The Canadian Young Adult Short Story of the Nineteenth Century Comes of Age

THOSE OF US GIVEN to celebrating age milestones in
adolescent literature will want to take special note of the following announcement:
"The Canadian Young Adult Short Story Turns 123 Years
Old in 1999." Some would have adolescent literature be a postmodernist
occurrence dating from The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton (1967) or, more expansively,
a half-century-old endeavour beginning with Seventeenth Summer
by Maureen Daly (1942), but this would be to...

"Just Above the Breadline": Social (ist) Realism in Canadian Short Stories of the 1930s

DOROTHY LlVESAY'S 1936 SHORT STORY "Case Supervisor"
opens with a senior social worker trying to escape the real world of the
Depression by going to the cinema. But there is no escape: the newsreels
flash images of "war, breadlines, crisis, drought," and even the feature film
begins by evoking what looks like the milieu that social workers deal with
every day. A young woman on the screen...

The Language of the Law: The Cases of Morley Callaghan

THIS DISCUSSION HAS TWO DISCRETE, yet intersecting,
points of departure. I want to consider, first, Morley Callaghan as an experimental
short story writer—more specifically, a postcolonial writer intensely
aware of his own resistant activity within a well-established
colonialist genre. I want to consider, in other words, Callaghan's radical experimentations
with both the language...

Rediscovering the Popular Canadian Short Story

HISTORIES OF THE CANADIAN SHORT STORY before
1970 generally focus on a limited and well-accepted group of writers, from
Charles G. D. Roberts to Stephen Leacock to Morley Callaghan and on to
the writers who emerged during the flowering of Canadian literature in
the 1960s. The impression one gets is that during this period,...

"Love and Death": Romance and Reality in Margaret Laurence's A Bird in the House

A BIRD IN THE HOUSE, Margaret Laurence's 1970 collection
of short stories set in Manawaka, is a female Canadian Bildungsroman
chronicling the maturation of protagonist Vanessa MacLeod. A Bird in
the House is also a metafictional Kunstlerroman like The Diviners, a fiction
about fiction narrating the development of an artist, because Vanessa
becomes a novelist, like Morag Gunn. Narrated...

Oedipus and Anti-Oedipus, Myth and Counter-Myth: Sheila Watson's Short Fiction

THE OPENING PANORAMIC SHOT of the National Film
Board documentary on Sheila Watson would (if one existed) likely capture
the institution surrounded by gardens where her father, Dr. Charles Edward
Doherty, was superintendent of the Provincial Mental Hospital in
New Westminster, British Columbia (Bessai andjackel, "Sheila Watson" 3).
On the cover of Watson's collection...

Mapping Munro: Reading the "Clues"

THIS QUOTATION IS FROM "The Albanian Virgin"
(1994)—a story in which, perhaps, Alice Munro has strayed as far as she yet
has (at least culturally if not geographically) from her "home place," Huron
County, Ontario. In that straying, we seem both to have left Munro
country and, at the same time, not: here is a...

Hands and Mirrors: Gender Reflections in the Short Stories of Alistair MacLeod and Timothy Findley

WHAT DO THE SHORT STORIES of Alistair MacLeod
and Timothy Findley have in common, and how do they "reflect" and "reflect
on" gender? Seemingly old-fashioned MacLeod, his roots in the oral
tradition and Cape Breton's Celtic culture, described by Michael Ondaatje
as "one of the best short story writers in Canada"1... and Findley, a publicly gay or homosexual writer,2 whose critically...

"To make the necessary dream perpetual": Postrealist Heroes in Canadian Short Fiction

TEN YEARS AGO at an international conference in
Rome, Robert Kroetsch presented a paper entitled "Learning the Hero
from Northrop Frye." Though liberally sprinkled with what Kroetsch himself
calls "wilful misprisions" in the manner we have come to expect of him,
his paper is nevertheless a delightfully wilful tribute to Frye. Kroetsch applauds
Frye's dictum that, in the process of...

The Canadian Short Story

I WOULD LIKE TO BEGIN BY STATING that everything that
is to follow is, in the words of Alice Munro, "an offering." In other words
"you the listeners" may take from these remarks whatever might prove
helpful. It is very difficult to be truly objective in dealing with literary matters
and even the most "objective" of views may,...

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